User participation ‐ a closed dialogue

The arguments presented in this article centre on attempts to Jorge architectures that are appropriate to the new South Africa. These efforts are rooted in our long‐held, modernist commitment to architectures that do more than simply reflect the societies in which they are produced. Buildings, for us, are not merely images of what is, of how we live at the moment. On the contrary, we hold that, via its material presence as embodied human action, architecture can and does speak of what might be and of how we might live. Appropriate architectures for the new South Africa must, then, help to shape and educate people's desires. This, of course, is much more than just a matter of form and style. In the nineteenth century, engineers and architects were called on to accommodate new social relationships in the new building types they designed: factories, railway stations, public libraries and so on. In the same way South African designers in the 1990s are being challenged to apply their knowledge and skills to the new spatial demands of their burgeoning democratic society. In confronting these expectations, architects have to work closely with the users of the buildings they design; that is, the community. In short, the new spatial forms which architects propose need to embody the participatory processes which will produce them.     

An investigation of the information content of foreign sensitive payment disclosures

The study investigates the information content of the foreign sensitive payment disclosures made during the Securities and Exchange Commission's ‘voluntary’ disclosure program. The results of the information content tests and the tests of the relationship between payment size and abnormal security returns imply that investors may have been reacting to the expectation of the loss of future business or to the possibility of future government sanctions.     

Asymmetric information and agenda control: The bases of monopoly power in public spending

A pervasive empirical finding, widely known as the ‘flypaper effect’, is that lump-sum intergovernmental grants generate considerably greater public spending by the recipient jurisdiction than would be predicted by equivalent shifts in personal income in that jurisdiction. Moreover, such observations are inconsistent with standard median voter models of the political process. We posit a model in which it is in the interest of suppliers of a collectively provided good not to generate full information to voters about outside aid. The empirical results are consistent with ‘flypaper’ and suggest that voters are very poorly informed about outside grants.     

The City of London and the Manufacturing Industry

Last October the Director-General of the Confederation of British Industry delivered the annual Gresham Special Lecture in Gresham College in the City of London, in which he considered ways of developing a closer and potentially more fruitful relationship between the City and the UK manufacturing industry. The lecture is here reproduced with permission.     

Estimating individual company costs of capital from cross-sectional data: A random coefficients approach

The purpose of this study is to extend the empirical analysis of Thompson (1979) to generate individual company costs of equity capital from statistical analysis of cross-sectional industry data. The paper uses a new random coefficients regression approach on 18 cross-sections of 75 electric utilities for the years 1963–1980. The results show rank stability between years and plots of individual company costs of average and simple facts about companies. The procedure does not allow calculation of standard errors of the estimates but when compared with existing cost of capital methods is shown to be a useful addition to the methodology of estimation.     

DIMENSIONAL SIMPLIFICATION AND ECONOMIC THEORIES OF LEGISLATIVE BEHAVIOR

In many many places, the political parties and political contests seem to array themselves along a single dimension. If you look at their programs in detail it always turns out that it's much more complicated than that. But it would appear that in the minds of the voters they are literally frequently arrayed on a single continuum which, as a result of the organization of the French chamber of deputies, is usually referred to as a left/right.     

Valuing Debt in a Complex Capital Structure

This article extends previous bond valuation models to account for more realistic assumptions regarding financial distress. Realized value of an individual bond under severe financial distress will reflect the expected outcome of credit-event negotiations and the relative priority listing of the security. We explicitly represent the probability rate of credit-event occurrence as a function of firm value relative to the fixed overall debt obligations of the firm. Risk premiums generated under reasonable parameter value choices fall within the range of observed bond risk premiums. Our model also provides an explanation as to why observed bond risk premia are positive after adjustment for default.